Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Monday, 29 April 2013

I came across the photograph below, showing Ayrshire coal miners on New Terrace around 1918,. in a museum in Kilmarnock. Notice the attire similar to NE miners of the period. Can you spot someone we know?

Friday, 26 April 2013

About 10 years ago, the University of Newcastle completed the Structural Images of the North East SINE project. This provides an excellent educational resource which is catalogued, indexed and mapped. It spans several local photographic collections, including those of Grace McCombie, Stafford Linsley, Norman McCord and Thomas Harrison Hair.

There are many ways to access the project. You may find it interesting to approach via a map of structures in your favourite locality, eg around Tanfield Railway. This shows houses at Marley Hill pit, the old bridge at Houghwell Burn, etc. Get used to the zoom in/out and cross hairs.These links and many others are provided on this blog - click under the heading picture.

Wednesday, 24 April 2013

The Tanfield waggonway dates from 1725 and earlier. Tanfield Railway in its current form has a history going back to about 1971. You may be interested in the photographs of early days on the Flickr site which is maintained by Tommy and Robert Knox.

Neil with a kettle - Pickering's Sentinel is being used as Causey station pilot in the early 1990s, like AW No.2 currently - at that time the line from Causey to East Tanfield was under construction.Flickr is one of the key links provided under the heading picture on this blog.

However, please note that the usual http://tanfield-railway.blogspot.comis the recommended method of viewing this TR blog, because it usually loads faster, works with more browsers, and shows several areas which the above views omit. The alternate views are supplied by the Google Blogger host, on a trial basis, and are not built into the TR blog.

If you think that one of these views is particularly useful, or find that one doesn't work on your browser, please email

Firstly, I would like to thank everyone for helping to maintain the blog, including by sending photos, while I am unable to get to the railway as often.Secondly, I have changed most posts so that they break after the first photo, as on smartphones - please click View more to see the rest of the post, or simply click the post title.I would like to try this for several reasons:1. more posts are shown, so it should be easier to look back if you only visit occasionally;2. clicking on February 2013 (for example) shows every post in that month, so it should be possible to quickly look back for an event (this didn't happen when full posts were shown);3. because there may be more clicks to different posts, I think the blog should appear in more web searches, which will increase the profile of Tanfield Railway and its workers.Feedback would be welcome.ThanksDerek

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You are invited to travel any Sunday in wooden carriages on the world's oldest railway, the 1725 route of the Tanfield Waggonway. Visit the world's oldest engine shed at Marley Hill, which has housed industrial steam locomotives from North East England since 1854. ... more info ....